NO LONGER ENCUMBERED BY ANY SENSE OF FAIR PLAY, EX-JOURNALISTS RETURN TO ACTIVE DUTY TO FIGHT THE TRUMPIAN MENACE!

One for Beatle John

This ain’t no April Fool: Field Marshal Breitbart . . . at the right hand of the president.

When first asked — quite a while back, I might add — to submit my thoughts on the malignant threat a Donald Trump presidency posed to our country and the world in general, I thought, “Why the hell not?”

I may not be much on politics anymore — due largely to my boredom with the assorted liars, hacks, thieves and alleged pundits who host them on Sunday mornings — but I still write things. Funny things, hopefully. Besides, John Lennon once famously pointed out that humor, not violence, is how you beat these swine, and I like John, so I figured why not turn down the sound on the ballgame and do my part? (right after Altuve bats).

After all, how difficult could it be, waxing wise about a president who is literally the color of Cheetos, right? That he was accompanied to Washington, D.C., by a staff consisting of the most extreme collection of mutant ass-clowns since Nixon’s goose-stepping robots was not lost on me either.

You’d think Field Marshal Breitbart’s physical appearance alone would be good for several lengthy diatribes, wouldn’t you? I’m not PC, after all. You show up at the White House looking like you spent the previous night sleeping off an ether binge on a park bench and you’re fair game in my eyes. The White House? Really? You couldn’t even work the evening shift at an ’80s-era newspaper looking like that. (OK, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but you get the idea).

Damn, that felt good. Now back to the point I think I started out trying to make …

Writing smack about this Mussolini-leaning freak show should’ve been the equivalent of a walk in the park. However, up until the just-completed rant about Field Marshal Breitbart, it has not been. At least, not for me, and now I think I know the reason: Trump and his merry band of buffoons are everywhere! TV. Radio. The internet. Everywhere. Walking things back. Walking things forward. Walking them back again. Shifting focus. Changing subjects. Showing more lateral movement than Joe Frazier saw in three fights with Muhammad Ali, all the while scaring the sane people of the world shitless four or five times a day, and that’s during a slow news cycle.

I’m surprised I haven’t stumbled across Chris Matthews trying to interview one of Stephen Miller’s farts by now (an undertaking that would be far more newsworthy and wasted less of my time than Rachel Maddow’s big “Trump tax reveal,” but I digress).

To make matters worse — at least for someone like me who has spent a lifetime making fun of grotesque, terrible things in order to avoid joining the ranks of the scared shitless — virtually everything Trump and his minions do is so far beyond the realm of self-parody that there really isn’t much left to say. Do you really need a third party, even one as talented as Alec Baldwin, to point out the absurdity of it all? If you do, you certainly have plenty of sources to choose from. I thought I had a pretty good idea to write about the other night, only to hear the gist of it coming from John Oliver, British accent and all, less than three hours later.

In a way, I think this same lack of focus has caused many of those we rely upon to do the serious work of news gathering to perform at less than optimum effectiveness, to put it mildly — at least until lately. Of course, I could be wrong. They may have just gotten tired of looking like a bunch of fawning sycophants whenever the new emperor entered a room, and decided to start doing their jobs. Maybe their bosses even got out of the way so they could. It happens. I still have faith in the media. Sort of.